Lola (Jacques Demy)

[flixyflox]

Hi Svet, Happy New Year and I hope you are recovering well from the flu. It's been a bad health end of year for quite a few of us, indeed I spent the night before Xmas in an Emergency Cardiac ward!

Anyway. I wanted to pay you the courtesy of reading your review before posting my response. Regrettably but inevitably you seem to have come to the same conclusions as me and others. In this case I don't know if this is simply a case of too many hands in the pie, or over zealous grading from one of the later parties in the process. In any case the only word to describe this transfer is horrible.

I want to make three points which I think are salient. First of all the caps I lifted from elsewhere and posted at Criterionforum were a mixture of direct 720 rez png from the transcoded rip but two of them were resized from direct 1080p png screens taken from the m2ts files. Both "types” of screens show equally bad back crushing and softness, filtering and all the other horrors this transfer is prone to.

Next: the minute I hear that either Agnes or Mathieu has had a hand in the restoration I hear alarm bells. The two of them exercise a near insane proprietorialism over Demy's films, and Agnes is well noted for her meddling hand. I will say no more about this, but you have to consider these are two people who have seen fit to totally rewrite Demy's life as some sort of sugar coated fairy tale for their own personal and frankly insulting reasons, completely erasing any mention of Jacque's bi and homosexuality, and the causes of his death. As an a queer man who lived through and survived the AIDS nightmare and watched most of his friends die, I take very profound offence at this sort of historical revisionism which is of course grounded in Agnes and Mathieu’s distaste for the simple facts of Demy sexual life. Screw them I say, it’s Demy we want to see and his films as he shot them.

Finally, there is in circulation an HDTV720p Arte broadcast of La Baie des Anges which definitely shows off Rabier’s gorgeous Scope photography to magnificent effect. Certainly it honors the director’s and DPs intentions in a way that this botched Lola cannot even come near doing for Demy or Coutard. Re the latter I regret to say I am finding recent accreditations of “Approval” to Coutard relating to new Blu Rays as highly unreliable. One such is the source for the Criterion WeekEnd which does not in any way resemble the original release prints. I saw this film at the opening session of the opening day at the MacMahon Cinema in Paris at 11am December 29 1967 and I still remember it vividly. So some of us are still around even if we’re too old to be believed or even taken seriously.
All the best.
D

[pro-bassoonist]

Hello David,

Happy New 2013 to you and your loved ones

And thank you, I was indeed very sick for 2 weeks. I am still recovering but at least I can read and write now without getting that vertigo-like effect. I hope you are staying healthy.

Lola -- I don't know what else to tell you. Like you, I am disappointed. The film does not look as it should. But - assuming that you do not have the disc yet - I would like to clarify a couple of things.

1. Mathieu was in Los Angeles for the film's digital restoration. Portions of his discussions with Tom Burton and his guys are included in one of the special features on the disc. What they are claiming is that they tried to preserve the film's organic look, as it is on the BFI print they had to work with. But I don't know exactly what they did and how, and I don't want to speculate. But if I had to guess, I would say that someone again did something in France. This new transfer is degrained, and there are all sorts of digital artifacts on it. If you blow it up through a digital projector, you could easily see them.

2. Agnes does not appear to have been involved with the digital restoration as closely as you may think. I don't believe she visited Technicolor. Perhaps some additional work was done under her guidance later on. Mathieu was involved, and he is credited for the new color grading. (There is plenty on the restoration if you click on one of the links I left earlier).

By the way, I have the Arte DVD of La Baie des Anges. For a DVD release, it looks great. If they don't go "restoring" it any further, and just transfer what they have on Blu-ray, it should look great.

Great to hear from you, David.

S.

p.s. If you are still in Paris, I trust you are enjoying the city